Darren, I haven't been on this board for very long but your pain is palpable. I can actually feel it. I also feel your confusion, and your lack of motivation.
What I want to ask you about is giving up drugs and how you found it so easy once you understood. I am a chronic alcoholic and have been for almost 40 years. I use alcohol to try and dampen the pain. The pain changes from time to time. First, it started off being the pain of being married but alone. I was in a new country with a new husband. He seemed to getting it altogether by getting a job and making friends etc. I had a lot more trouble getting a job and I remember Melbourne Cup Day, either 1972 or 1973, sitting home and watching TV because I had never seen anything like it in my life (In South Africa, we didn't have TV and we certainly didn't have anything like the Melbourne Cup). I was watching one of the TV channels which broadcast the whole day. Everyone filmed was drinking and appeared to be having a good time. I decided that that was what I had to do. I went and got a bottle of Vermouth and some some lemonade. I spent the rest of the day in an alcoholic haze. Boy, did I enjoy the feeling of relief not being subjected to all those feelings of I did not really know what.
The second round of pain started when I found I was married to a man who put his career before me and our relationship. Again although now working, I found I spent a lot of time alone. This gave me a lot of time to reflect. But it was only when the rejections set in, that I started to be concerned. I now know my mother was a narc, and now I found I was married to a narc but I didn't use that word to describe him. What happened was he used to work long hours, and I was left to do his household and gardening chores. Instead of being appreciative, he criticised me for me for not doing like he did them. Bells started ringing in my head. Somewhere in the fog that was my past, I remembered my mother doing the same thing.
The third round of pain came after my husband and I separated and I moved on. I met an older man, who had a group of friends that spent hours discussing relationship problems with a huge amount of alcohol and late, late nights.
The forth round of pain started when I married this seemingly kindly psychologist. Boy, did he mess with my head. I used to drink to distance myself from his seeming completely unemotional assessment of everything I did, like I was the client. I even found clinical notes (in the bin) that he wrote about me. So I started acting like his emotional mouthpiece, ie his was completely devoid of emotions, so I did his feeling for him. It became a sack of baggage that I carried around all the time, like being 20 kilos overweight.
Again, whilst putting together bits and pieces about my life, I just couldn't fit it altogether, like a jigsaw missing a couple of pieces. It is only recently that I met someone who provided the missing pieces of the puzzle and I can now see it so clearly. The problem is even though I have solved the puzzle, I seem to still need the numbing quality of the alcohol. I have convinced myself that I am most lucid when I dull my emotions and write or talk about my feelings. Maybe, it is just a habit, maybe it is just a crutch that I have got used to.
So Darren, I am very interested in how you came to the conclusion, you no longer needed the drugs. I have been told it is possible but I want to know how you did it. It must have taken a lot of courage, and commitment.
I hope some of what I had written makes sense.
Kim in Oz.
